I really miss you all.

A lot.

Final "exam" info Or, watch Angela abuse the strikethrough tag.

From this page at the registrar's site: (chart deleted)

It IS listed as a MWF course. The table doesn't offer single-day courses, just MWF, TTH, and Saturday classes. Down at the bottom, though, it cautions that

Tuesday/Thursday classes which meet only one day/week or Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes which meet less than three days/week may result in the same classroom being assigned for two different exams. Instructors: If you are giving a final exam during the week, and your class falls into the above description, please make a room reservation to ensure a testing place.

So as I understand it, this means that our meeting time is indeed at noon on Tuesday, but that if we were going to meet in our usual classroom (and not a restaurant) there might be conflicts.

BUT, didn't somebody say they already had a noon on Tuesday final? Apparently, classes that meet at 7:30 in the morning on MWF also have their final at that time. If that's the case, does anyone have any suggestions?

I know some people had found other dates/times for our exam. Where did you dates come from? I wouldn't put it past the university to say two different things in two different places.

EDIT: Ignore what I wrote above. Our real exam time is 7:30 in the morning on Thursday. Soo.... 8 o'clock breakfast?

Everyone's still cool with Lou Henri's, right?


EDIT the Second: In case anyone missed the email, instead of a final class, we're having final office hours, between 1pm and 3pm on Thursday, whenever it's convenient to drop by. If the weather is nice, Adrienne says she'll be on a bench in the Ped Mall somewhere, likely around the corner of Dubuque and Washington. If the weather sucks, she'll be in her office.

If you do a google search for images of prisons, you find a lot of stuff you sorta wish you hadn't.

This reminds of Alamanac of the Dead. Big business in real estate to build prisons and promise to fill them, huh. They make it sound like a hotel.

"He said it was too early to predict exactly where inmates would come from, but federal prisons throughout the country are overcrowded. "

This is a Take Over, Not a Make Over

yay community control!

okay, don't have much to say yet because i haven't yet read it, but i was searching for prison images and found this online mag written by political prisoners about what my skimming told me is some really great stuff! some of the images are pretty hard to handle, so enter prepared.

oh, i guess the link above is to a dated issue. try here for the home page.

Wow! this is even better than i thought! everybody check it out and let me know what you think!!! this could be some good resources for talking about the Prison Industrial Complex, among other things.

Updated Presentation Archive

Hey Kids,

Click here to see the latest additions to the presentation archive. If any of you are willing to share presentations and haven't yet, please send 'em to me!

WHITE PRIVILEGE

Yay for the first post on the liberated(hahaha) class blog! I've wanted to share this with you for the past week or so but it was never really appropriate. I'm so glad we now have the blog to share things with each other!

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a big thing for Radiohead. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, they have really changed my life. Ever since I heard the opening chords of "Planet Telex" in eighth grade I knew that I was getting into some real different type shit. My love affair started then and continues until this day. Entering the world of Radiohead was the starting point on my musical adventures, both playing myself and listening. It was also their message that really resonated with me and taught me to be more critical of our politics and culture. They have never let me down and their latest video is no exception. It's for the song "All I Need" off their latest album and it poignantly exposes our first world privilege. Check it out:



The only criticism that I have is that it was jointly produced by MTV, but they are using it as sort of a freely distributed PSA, so it's not so bad. From this article:

Under the music broadcaster's EXIT (end exploitation and trafficking) campaign, MTV and Radiohead have jointly produced a video for the "In Rainbows" track "All I Need," which will premiere Thursday on all of MTV's channels and sites around the world. (Watch video at left.)

Yorke said the band linked with MTV to highlight such issues as child slavery, enforced servitude and sex trafficking because it was "about exploiting a situation while you have the chance."

"All power to MTV for taking this on because its obviously going to be difficult for them in terms of the advertisers," he said. "With the ('All I Need') video, their lawyers had to beg to make sure there wasn't a single white trainer with a logo on it because the implication would be a little too close. But the implication is still there."

And now it begins ...

Our class may be over in the sense that we won't be seeing each other each Thursday, but this space is ours, now more than ever. I just sent out invitations for 20 of you to be blog "administrators." That means you each can make posts any time you like. I will also come here at least once a week to send you all a message.

I know this will be the first time blogging for many of you. When you get your invitation, it will include some instructions on how to sign in and access the blog. Once you do, it's not too hard to find your way around. You'll see a "dashboard," and from there, you can click on the link to make a "new post." (Or, if you are savvy and feel like making changes to the template, adding links, etc., go nuts.) If you click on "new post," you'll be taken to a window that lets you write your post. There are two ways to do it, using either the "edit html" or "compose" modes. If you are new to blogger, the "compose" mode is easier. Just type in what you want to write. If you have an image to upload, there is an icon 3rd from the left above the window where you type to do that, and if you want to add a link to another website, use the icon on the 6th from the right up there. If you have any trouble, let me know.

To keep us feeling the love and the urgency, please enjoy this video of my (probably) favorite song performed by Diskarte Namin!

Who protects and serves us? Thoughts and information from Randy

Randy sent me a great message last night. I'm posting part of it below (emphasis mine).

I found the spreadsheet of all data gathered through OSHA and another federal bureau that records occupational fatalities (http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/CFOI_Rates_2006.pdf). These are the numbers for 2006, but two numbers that I can point out specifically are Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers which had a rate of 16.8 (rater here is number of fatalities divided by number of total workers times 100,000, or the number represents how many thousandths of a percent of the total workforce is killed). The second, Military, had a fatality rate of 5.3 -- I don't know if this can be trusted though, since it seems to only factoring in 57 deaths for the year; maybe stateside deaths in the year minus suicides. If you do a quick scroll of the occupations and keep an eye on the right column (the rate for all occupations), you'll find that these are very low. I was wrong when I said farming. I'm guessing that the number I heard was a little old and before tractors had roll-over cages and other safety features. Their number is still rather high at 33.5 for Crop Production. The highest rate comes from fishers and fishing workers, although there are a lot more farmers in comparison. Also to be noted are truckers, who had a higher rate than farmers, although I suppose that isn't too surprising.

... Law enforcement, which the public is always led to believe is in constant dire danger as they "protect" us, is in much less threat than farmers. And farmers do a whole lot more to serve and protect us than any law enforcement officer.

Happy May Day, Everybody!

I don't regret setting aside the May Day plans to deal with what we needed to discuss. That's how life is, right? We are often presented with situations that demand our immediate attention, and if we've learned anything together this semester, I hope it's that our lives and our struggles are connected. That's actually one of the reasons May Day is special to me and why it's the only holiday I celebrate. It is a time to remember that we aren't "criminals." I just posted a few things on my personal blog here that you might want to check out, but I really want to encourage you to find your own way to celebrate May Day, even if it's late.

Watching Matewan would be a great way to do it! That movie really gets to me no matter how many times I see it, and even though we didn't watch it together, I really hope you all make time to see it. Here is a synopsis from the director.

And you can also watch some recent footage of May Day demonstrations. Here are some. I'm sure you can find more.

Gitmo

It's someone's birthday today!!

That person is in our class!
That person is sometimes a tomato!
That person is always HMONG!
Yeah!

Figuring out the rest of the semester! Can you all help?

Hi everyone,
How will we fit it all in?

For next week (April 24), make sure you've finished Almanac of the Dead and read the poem “Somebody Blew Up America” by Amiri Baraka. (Click on the poem title to access it.)

I'm planning to show you The Battle of Algiers (121 minutes) and Homotopia (27 minutes). The Black Panthers watched The Battle of Algiers, as have Pentagon officials trying to stop insurgent movements. I feel like it's a film this class needs to engage, and Homotopia invokes it in some neat ways. That leaves us only 30 minutes to discuss the book, which I'd like us to discuss in relation to the poem. Here's the basic question I want us to address: What is Baraka's history, and what is Almanac's future? We'll have to stay on schedule to make this work.

I have imagined May 1 to be our special May Day Class! We have presentations by EW and KW scheduled for this day, and I'd also really still like to show you Matewan, which is 135 minutes, but that would leave just 45 minutes for the two presentations, which isn't fair, huh? I know VJ really wants to see this movie, and I think it's some important issues we haven't addressed together. I have an idea for how to make it work.

Here's what I'd like to suggest: KW could do her presentation on the 1st, and EW could do hers on the last day, May 8 (if she's willing), when we'll also discuss Angela Davis' book Are Prisons Obsolete? on that last day.

MH still wants to fit a presentation in too. We could add him into the last day too. But I sure would like additional time for us to talk more. Can we figure something out? Can you all please help me come up with a time when we can meet together, maybe during finals week?

Here are some trailers and film clips to get you excited! I really do want us to see at least Battle of Algiers and Matewan. I'd like to keep Homotopia in too if possible, especially after JM's prez. But I am definitely open to suggestions and ideas.

Upcoming talk

Chiaki Sakai, our beloved Japan Studies librarian, thought some of you might be interested in this public lecture:

Martial Guedron, art historian from Strasbourg, France, will speak April 21

Martial Guedron, a professor of art history at the Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, France, will speak about the "look" of race that was created by the earliest anthropologists in a University of Iowa guest lecture at

7 p.m on Monday, April 21, in Room 116 of Art Building West.

Guedron's lecture, "Nature, Ideal, and Caricature: The Perception of Physical Types by the First Anthropologists," is free and open to the public.

"People of color often first circulated in Europeans' orbit through words and images produced by anthropologists," Guedron notes. "These anthropological images arose at the intersection of aesthetic criteria, scientific accounts of human differences and racial prejudices in 18th-century physiognomic arguments about the 'look' of race. These same systems of representation then circulated even more widely and damagingly in the innumerable caricatures of the period."

Guedron's talk is sponsored by the UI School of Art and Art History; the 18th/19th-Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium of UI International Programs; the departments of English, French and Italian, and History; the African Studies Program; Caribbean, Diaspora and Atlantic Studies; the European Studies Group; and the UI Center for Human Rights.

VJ posted this poem on Facebook and told me I could share it!

High Hood Pressure

The doctor told me the other day that I was sick, cause I could’ve eaten better
bad heart, frustrated, whole life’s just one big stressor.
He said “your dad died young, so did your uncle, typical of High Blood Pressure,
Evicted, broke, cops, dope, forget that, this is High Hood Pressure.
See I was thinkin the other day, “do niggas like to kill each other”?
Shootin each other over some shoes, do niggas like to struggle?
We run from cops, and so we should, they’ll kill ya before they’ll help ya
Sometimes we run and aint did shit, that’s a symptom of High Hood Pressure.
See I hadn’t seen a suburb or nice pool except on my t.v
but when I walk out my front door just pools of poverty.
One day I went to school, my brother got shot and dad locked away
But I was still alive with no felonies, so that was a positive day.
See I did good on a test one time, my teacher said “let’s call home”!
I said “my mom would like to know, but damn, we aint got no phone”.
See I was in like the 4th grade before I found out we were poor,
Teacher pissed me off cause my mom didn’t make 20 thousand or more.
So that day I was thinking are we just some broke down tramps?
Forget that, a nigga still felt good to eat from them food stamps!
So if you say something dumb, and I use my fist to check ya,
Don’t think that I’ve gone insane, I’m just suffering from High Hood Presseure.
“so doc is there a pill or shot to alter my angry vision”?
This High Hood Pressure gone get a nigga locked up in the prison.

Definitions and Food for Thought

Big thanks to DS and SV for doing such excellent jobs!

Next week, the order of presentations will be SC followed by RE and then JM.

JM asked me to post some definitions on the blog in preparation for next week. JM plans to use some terms like queer, trans, and two spirit as shorthand next week precisely because many words involve exclusion or distortion. For that to make sense, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with terms that may be new to you. As always, we each come to the class with different associations and different vocabularies. You can prepare for next week by checking out the definitions available here, here, here, and here. One term in particular JM will use is discussed here and here, as well as on websites for groups like this one and this one. Oh, and check out this too.

JM would also like you to watch the following video before class. When you do, please think about what Ellen says. JM would like us to think about "what is good about it but also how it might be harmful." JM also asks us to consider, "how we might be able to talk about situations like this in different ways so as to not cause harm."


There may be more to come, so stay tuned!

Proof you are not the only people who are reading or have read this novel

These are just some of the essays people have written about our novel.

The Ecological Politics of Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead by Bridget O'Meara (PDF)

Envisioning a "Network of Tribal Coalitions": Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead by Channette Romero (Project Muse, so you need to log in through the UI library)

Death of Love/Love of Death: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead by Janet St. Clair (JSTOR, so access while logged into the library website)

The Silko Road from Chiapas or Why Native Americans Cannot Be Marxists by
Tamara M. Teale (JSTOR again)

The Uses of Blood in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead by Jane Olmsted

Counter-Chronicling and Alternative Mapping in Memoria del fuego and Almanac of the Dead by Virginia E. Bell (JSTOR)

Next week and another birthday!

Hey, PL told me that someone else in our class has a birthday tomorrow!

That person makes jokes. That person isn't afraid to disagree. That person values the power of language.

Happy Birthday!

So, I'm thinking a lot about what I didn't make happen today and what I want to happen next week. Here's the order of events/topics for next week:

1. Mad Maps
2. Brando
3. Hmong

I want to allow ample time for all three. I'd also like us to start dealing with the book. If you want to help get us moving in that direction, pick a character (or a few) you like (or can't stand, find interesting, etc.) and say something about her/him/them below.

Let me help get the ball rolling by asking what you think of the following passage from p. 316

No matter what you or anyone else did, Marx said, history would catch up with you; it was inevitable, it was relentless. The turning, the changing, were inevitable.

The old people had stories that said much the same, that it was only a matter of time and things European would gradually fade from the American continents. History would catch up with the white man whether Indians did anything or not.

Hey, PL, can you send us the info on the article you mentioned in class? EO has jury duty. :)

Someone's Birthday is Today!

That person is a member of our class.
That person is brave.
That person is beautiful.
And that person is sincerific!

Error in the paper today

Today's Daily Iowan printed the wrong date for the speaking event featuring IVAW member Andrew Duffy and C.O. Jason Munford. IT IS NOT TONIGHT IN THE IMU. IT IS TOMORROW NIGHT, WEDNESDAY MARCH 26, AT 7PM IN THE SOUTH ROOM OF THE IOWA MEMORIAL UNION. See www.uiantiwar.org for all 'Peace Week' schedule details.